Pressure mounts on Catholic-run family planning clinics in Papua New Guinea

Family planning efforts face church opposition in Papua New Guinea (photo: Facebook/Spacim Pikinini)

The World

Pressure is mounting on Papua New Guinea's Government to reconsider its contracts with health clinics run by the Catholic Church, amid concerns some are deliberately failing to meet their obligations of providing a full family planning service.

Key points:

Religious bodies maintain artificial means should not be used to prevent birth

Reports the Catholic Church is destroying family planning divisions

Disagreement remains as to how widespread these occurrences are

PNG's considered to be one of the world's most religious countries — 96 per cent of the country identify as Christian, and about a quarter of the population are Catholic.

While advocating natural methods of contraception, the Church insists it also provides counselling and a patient referral system, which is a requirement of its contract with the PNG Health Department.

But family planning advocates claim items being provided to Catholic clinics by the Government go unused and are being destroyed, while others report spot checks are being carried out by senior church officials.

'They have to respect the plan of God'

The Catholic Church officially promotes the natural "ovulation method", but the outspoken views of people like Rolando Santos, the Bishop of Alotau, point to a much harder line which is causing considerable anger among health professionals.

"They should not use artificial means in order to prevent the natural process from taking place," he told the ABC's Pacific Beat program.

"They have to respect the plan of God, of nature."

Family planning advocate Wendy Stein, who set up the NGO Spacim Pikinini — which translates as "space your children" — to provide implants to women living in remote PNG, has raised her concerns about the Catholic Church.

"They're out of touch and I feel like they're oppressing the indigenous people in PNG," she said.

"We've had instances where the bishops send teams out to villages with propaganda and discourage people, whether they're Catholic or not, about the implant."

She has had her own run-ins with Father Santos, who questioned the work of her NGO.

"I've had conversations with the Bishop here, he called me probably 18 months ago to have a discussion about it and told me stop what I was doing, it was wrong and that I'd go to hell," she told Pacific Beat.

Father Santos said his big concern is that NGOs like Spacim Pikinni are providing implants to teenage girls.

"It's just not to mothers. It's not just to adults, even to young people they're giving the implants to them," he said.

"This can embolden a woman."

Family planning NGOs say they target young women because teenage pregnancy rates are defying global trends, and growing.

The UN's Population Fund estimates that one in six PNG females will have her first child before she turns 18.

'Absolute waste': Calls for funding to be cut

Dr Mola has raised the issue with senior health officials but he said nothing has changed, because the Government relies so heavily on the Catholic Church to provide health services to remote PNG.

"I believe that a health agency has a moral obligation to provide services they're paid to provide and the Government provides salaries for health workers … and under those circumstances you're morally required to provide a full service," he said.

"If you're not, on religious grounds, able to provide part of the service, I believe the moral thing would be to return a proportion of the money to the Government."

Ms Stein from Spacim Pikinini wants them to go one step further.

"It's an absolute waste, their funding should be cut if they're not providing the full gamut of family planning and disposing of the boxes."

The PNG Health Department did not respond to repeated requests from the ABC for comment.